Similarly in the long-standing Serbian-Croatian conflict, the civilians killed were usually just innocent neighbors. The slaughter required the abandoning of personal history and current reality. Innocent victims were viewed in continuity with the earlier atrocities committed in previous wars by previous generations often unknown to them. The most bizarre and cruel aspect of the dissolution of Yugoslavia was that both Serbs and Croats managed to put aside their historic hatred and join in massacring their Bosnian Muslim neighbors. The traditional hatred was Christian against Christian. But in the chaos of the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the land grab that ensued, the Serbs managed to displace their hatred to the convenient Muslims. The result was the massacre at Srebrenica, which rivaled those of the Nazis. In the world of haters, all victims are fungible commodities.
A legitimate cause rarely generates the kind of hatred that sacrifices the innocent. Hatred works in the opposite direction. The “cause” does not generate the rage. The rage demands locating a cause. Resentment at one’s lot in life—remembering that there need not be actual deprivation but psychological feelings of deprivation—generates a powerful rage that seeks a justifiable outlet. The animal rights movement and its heated rhetoric supplied Harding—a presumed animal lover, since there were many other causes available—with a convenient hook on which to hang the hate generated by his inner turmoil.
There was no doubt that Harding was a diagnosed schizophrenic. But the law, itself, is “schizophrenic” in dealing with heinous crimes committed by the psychotic. The judge, Elgan Edwards, called Harding’s actions “pure evil,” which raises question about moral judgments and moral responsibility with psychotic individuals. If a crime is obscene enough, if it offends public morality, there will be a tendency to refuse to acknowledge the nonculpability assigned to the insane under the definitions of the sick role. The easiest way to do that is to deny the presence of the illness. There is latitude in accepting the definitions, since criminal insanity and psychosis are not congruent terms. The presence of a delusional psychosis in a defendant is not sufficient to meet the standards of criminal insanity in most jurisdictions. That will demand, in addition to delusions, a proven inability to conform one’s behavior to standards of right and wrong.
A case with an even more confusing amalgam of motivating factors is that of Colin George Dunstan, a forty-four-year-old Australian, who started his rampage of letter bombing in 1998—at least according to one psychiatrist’s testimony—because of a psychotic depression after the breakup of his relationship with a coworker. But his twenty-eight letter bombs were sent to a variety of government agencies. While it is true that both he and his girlfriend worked for the Australian Taxation Office, he had a previous history of hatred, independent of any perceived abuses on the job. Since his trial, it has surfaced that he was linked to a right-wing antigovernment terrorist group, the Australian Nationalists’ Movement, one of whose leaders, Jack Van Tongeren, is serving an eighteen-year sentence for bombing five Chinese restaurants in Perth. Dunstan, I suspect, is closer to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, who exhibited fewer symptoms of psychosis, than to Kaczynski, who was almost a prototype of the schizophrenic. Hate crimes that seem crazy need not be the product of crazy people.
The general public overestimates the potential danger of psychotic patients. We tend to respond to the sight of deranged psychotic individuals with fear. This fear is sustained by the occasional act of irrational rage performed by a psychotic individual, often a street person. During the time I was writing this book, there were reports in the New York Times of a stabbing on a public bus; a woman being pushed in front of a moving train; threatening assaults on the streets by a homeless man with a club. All of these are probably attributable to psychotic individuals. And all of these wrongly contribute to a sense that acts of hatred, like suicide bombings, must be acts of madmen.
In a major urban area of some twenty million people, like New York City, where the number of deranged wandering the streets must run into the hundreds of thousands, what is truly amazing is how few acts of violence are committed by them, not how many. There are probably fewer acts of violence committed by the psychotics that walk among us than the number of violent acts of road rage committed by the “normal.” Certainly fewer violent crimes are committed by the mentally ill than the acts of violence involving drugs, crime, and sex. In my years, admittedly few, of practicing in an institution, I was attacked by a patient only once and that was not by a psychotic. Most psychotics suffer internally and suffer in isolation.
The main danger with psychotics is that they are suggestible and manipulable. They are susceptible to the provocative language of extremists—the radical elements of the animal rights group and the right-to-life groups seem to attract the most psychotics. These causes have been adopted by paranoid schizophrenics to liberate them from the isolation of their personal demons. Finding affirmation in a group rationalizes their delusions, making them feel less crazy.
Although psychotics contribute to a very small segment of hate crimes, the leaders of hate groups are unlikely to be psychotic. Remember that the psychotic is a shattered individual who has a tenuous hold on reality. He is obsessed and preoccupied with just keeping himself together. He is a loner who eschews human contact. He can do harm to others, but for the most part he, himself, is the greatest victim of his disease.
The psychopath, in contrast, is a manipulator and a user. He perceives others as a predator views prey. Unhampered by a conscience or feelings of shame or guilt, he exploits people as instruments to serve his personal gratification. He is a con artist and a grifter, a mugger and a rapist. While some acts of hatred are a product of the blurred vision of the psychotic, more are products of the distorted behavior of the psychopath.
The Psychopath
When we first moved to New York City from the less sophisticated environs of Ohio, my wife would read with anxiety the headlines in the tabloids, to which we had not been previously exposed. She would be particularly concerned with the group that came under the heading: “Model Boy Kills Mother!” She would ask me, as a budding psychiatrist, how that could happen. I explained that by definition anybody who killed his mother was not a “model boy.” Invariably these model boys had evidenced less than model behavior in their past. Most were psychopaths.
Hate groups are not societies of psychotic or borderline psychotic individuals. Their members are more likely to be people who have been labeled by psychiatrists as either psychopaths or sociopaths. The psychopath is a severely flawed individual who illogically, but rationally, has been excluded from the category of the mentally ill. Illogically, because the mental distortions of the psychopath are in many ways as extreme as those of the schizophrenic. Rationally, however, because society could not function if psychopaths were allowed the privileges of the sick role. Given the kind of damage to their personhood they evidence and the actions to which this may lead, psychopaths will constitute the majority of chronic criminals. They must be held accountable, so psychiatrists have considered them “abnormal,” but not ill.
The psychopath is identified by the absence of a clearly defined moral system, one of the essential features that distinguishes Homo sapiens from lower animals. The psychopath is described as having no conscience mechanisms. Psychopaths operating without conscience or with severely limited ones are fairly prevalent, if not in our own lives, in the newspapers and television. They are found among the thugs who earn a living by knocking old ladies over the head with a lead pipe to get the meager contents of their purses; those who sell crack cocaine to indulge their penchant for the easy life; the corporate executives who in the face of negative research findings encourage the public to purchase carcinogenic substances like cigarettes; the Ponzi artists of Wall Street; the despots of the African states that starve their own people to accumulate Swiss bank accounts to support their decadent existences.
Obviously, “psychopathic,” like “paranoid,” is a term that represents a spectrum
of people with varying degrees of pathology. The label indicates the presence and nature of the pathology, not necessarily the degree. Just as there are degrees of paranoia, there are degrees of psychopathy. When racism was rampant in the American South, not all racists became members of the Klan. And when the Klan’s battle against integration was clearly lost, not all of them remained as active and aggressively obsessed with hatred as the Eastview 13 Klavern in Birmingham, Alabama. Indeed, when the time came to make a “political statement” on Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, not all members of this Klavern would have had it in them to throw a dynamite bomb into the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four innocent girls aged eleven to fourteen. The kind of hatred exemplified here, and the history of involvement in hate groups later revealed in the bombers, suggest that they fit the profile of psychopaths, evidenced through a lifetime of antisocial activities.
The term “psychopath” is usually reserved for the chronic criminal type who is incapable of seeing the wrong in what he does. Since he is incapable of feeling guilt or shame, he is equally incapable of displaying true remorse, even when it is to his advantage in a court of law. Unless psychopaths are consummate actors, as one finds in professional con men, their emotions ring false and hollow even in the eyes of the untrained jurors. But some are seductive and confident liars. Many people were reluctant to consider serial killer Theodore Bundy guilty of the murderous rampage, killing at least thirty-six women in the 1970s, in great part because of his physical attractiveness and easy manner.
The psychopath seeks opportunities to exercise his wanton cruelty and hatred. He pursues official activities that allow or call for the torture or humiliation of others. It is only the power of authority—sometimes a cult leader, but more disastrously, the state or organized religion—that can offer the psychopath a “legitimate” outlet for his unnatural impulses. The Birmingham, Alabama, bombers were likely psychopaths sanctioned by the perhaps less psychopathic characters of their racist colleagues, who applauded their behavior and protected them from early apprehension. The Germans—and the Lithuanians and Ukrainians—who volunteered to serve in the Nazi death camps were the counterparts of the street thugs who live by crime, and a great percentage of them were clearly psychopaths. One has to assume that they did not represent an authentic sample of those pressed into service by the Germans. But the Nazi Party did recruit a population of active psychopathic Jew haters into such legitimate state entities as the SS Einsatzgruppen, the killing corps that preceded the more efficient gas furnaces.
Some early students of human behavior perceived a human being as merely a sophisticated form of animal that, like the lower animals, is driven exclusively by hedonistic principles, that is, the desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure. The psychopath certainly operates in this manner, but he is not a normal human being.
Psychopathy is a developmental defect. We must not honor psychopathic behavior by seeing it as a natural extension of human drives. Most human beings are not driven exclusively by appetite and selfishness. We have ample evidence that survival and pleasure are decidedly not the only forces motivating humankind. A better case can be made for the potential within all of us for self-sacrificing actions.
Danger is great in times of war and disaster, yet acts of incredible courage are particularly manifest in these very situations. What motivates the soldier who hurls his body onto a grenade to save his comrades; the fireman who enters a blazing building to save a child; the captain who goes down with his ship after evacuating his passengers and crew? To explain such phenomena requires a more complex view of the human being than that of a survival-driven machine. In that great American classic, The Red Badge of Courage, the young nameless hero who had previously abandoned his comrades and fled the field of battle discovered courage:He suddenly lost concern for himself, and forgot to look at a menacing fate. He became not a man but a member. He felt that something of which he was a part—a regiment, an army, a cause, or a country—was in a crisis. He was welded into a common personality which was dominated by a single desire. For moments he could not flee no more than a little finger can commit a revolution from a hand.46
For most people, inborn beliefs shape conduct, and ideals like courage, generosity, honor, pride, patriotism, responsibility, charity, compassion, and empathy set standards for behavior. We do not always have the courage or strength to achieve our ideals, but when we abandon them, our conscience inflicts its toll for cowardice or weakness. Failing our internal principles produces the emotions of guilt and shame. These are as powerful elements in shaping normal human behavior as fear and rage; some would say they have greater motivating force. The agonies of guilt and shame make us pay a severe price for failing our ego ideal and perhaps prepare us for doing better in the future—that is, if we experience these emotions and if we perceive a future. The psychopath is capable of neither.
Characteristically, the psychopath is incapable of feeling either shame or guilt. He feels no contrition. Compounding this is a distorted sense of the future. He really may be perceived as denying the future. The psychopath grandiosely assumes that he will prevail without facing any punishment for his actions. Since it is only the present that he comprehends, he lives almost exclusively in the here and now, grabbing for instant gratification. Devoid of conscience, absent the emotions of guilt and shame, he pursues his own interests exclusively. The psychopath, driven by his personal survival needs, is motivated by the only emotions that operate within him: lust, greed, fear, and rage. He is effectively operating with the consciousness, and under the rules, that guide animal behavior. But he does not have the instinctual apparatus supplied to animals as an alternative to conscience. He will do that which higher primates would not, destroy children and the helpless, under the constricting influences of instinct.
While the psychopath can join a group, he has no capacity to identify with a larger group and feels no common purpose unless that purpose is the shared privilege of venting one’s hatred. The psychopath uses such groups only opportunistically. In the blood sport of killing, he may temporarily find an exhilarating sense of the power of the group. After the lynching, the mob will dissipate and deconstruct into its isolated and disparate individuals like the spent pieces of an old jigsaw puzzle. The psychopath certainly cannot identify with any principle or ideal that involves others except for hatred.
Explanations of the cause of psychopathy have undergone radical shifts over the centuries. In the nineteenth century, Richard L. Dugdale proposed that psychopathy was hereditary, coining the term “hereditary psychopath.” The two words became so intertwined that the term “psychopath” was eventually abandoned by many once Dugdale’s work was refuted. “Sociopath” was substituted. Unfortunately, Dugdale, the eugenics movement, and the use of eugenics to support Nazi racial theories were the final nails in the coffin, making any legitimate examination of genetic influences on behavior suspect.
Does it really matter whether psychopaths are born or made? They wreak their havoc anyway. When one sees them as agents of evil, how they are made becomes less important. But it certainly matters in the therapeutic and prophylactic world. We must also face up to the fact that a culture may encourage and support psychopathic behavior. It can bring out the paranoid elements of more normal populations. The psychopath is at his most dangerous when he possesses the intellect, the charisma, and the opportunity to fire up larger populations. We know that deceptive psychopaths have taken over large corporations and large nations.
Even when the psychopath does not possess those character traits that open the door to leadership, he can become the hit man, the torturer, or the executor of the policies of the leadership. The danger of the psychopath is compounded when he finds support in a culture of hatred. Then he becomes the agent of the resentments and frustrations, the humiliations and despair of that larger group. He will lead the Klan and run the furnaces at the Nazi death camps and encourage acts of terrorism.
It is sometimes difficult to distingu
ish the psychotic from the psychopathic. The pure schizophrenic is the easy case. There was a pathetic quality in the schizophrenic demeanor of Lucas Helder—with his serious attempt to create a pattern of “funny faces” out of the bombing sites—that was in sharp contrast to the cold, unyielding, and psychopathic hatred of Timothy McVeigh.
But the extreme psychopath is hard to distinguish from the psychotic, since almost all psychopaths display the marked paranoid traits that are the hallmarks of the paranoid schizophrenic. The organizational abilities and the people skills of Hitler suggest the psychopathic rather than the psychotic. And then there was the fact that the Germans almost universally adored him, actually found him charming. The author and reviewer Naomi Bliven expressed incredulity that the Germans “found charm in a man who gobbled sweets, made disgusting comments on food at the table, engaged in staring matches, bragged about his intelligence, and flew into a rage when anybody questioned one of his statements.” 47 She inferred that their love of Hitler revealed some idiosyncrasy of the Germans themselves.
With Stalin, the call is more difficult. He was universally distrusted and hated. With his readiness to locate enemies everywhere and in every population, he may well have been psychotic, although with his well-honed instincts for self-protection, I am likely to include him among the psychopaths. The behavior of such people as Idi Amin and Pol Pot, even when out of power, certainly suggest the psychopath. The evidence seems clear that the major despots of hatred are primarily psychopaths. Still, both psychotics and psychopaths represent the minority of those who kill with hatred.
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